Great piece. Jaffa is a very easy figure to admire and be repulsed by at the same time. Kendall wasn’t wrong imo that there’s a kind of latent Caesarist tendency in his work, but on the other hand I definitely agree that where Claremont has gone doesn’t follow deterministically from him either.
A data point of one, but I remember someone once reading something I had written on the Lincoln stuff and saying, essentially, "Thank God someone is finally saying this" when Jaffa showed up.
He’s better on Lincoln and the civil war than some of the liberal historians of his era, the section of Crisis where he completely disassembles Richard Hofstadter’s take on Lincoln comes to mind immediately.
Great piece. Jaffa is a very easy figure to admire and be repulsed by at the same time. Kendall wasn’t wrong imo that there’s a kind of latent Caesarist tendency in his work, but on the other hand I definitely agree that where Claremont has gone doesn’t follow deterministically from him either.
A data point of one, but I remember someone once reading something I had written on the Lincoln stuff and saying, essentially, "Thank God someone is finally saying this" when Jaffa showed up.
He’s better on Lincoln and the civil war than some of the liberal historians of his era, the section of Crisis where he completely disassembles Richard Hofstadter’s take on Lincoln comes to mind immediately.